


You descended, I amended (And I need it like a hole in the head)

by sovery



Series: Twist and Twine [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Female Harry, Female Harry Potter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-20
Updated: 2017-06-20
Packaged: 2018-11-16 09:44:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11250552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sovery/pseuds/sovery
Summary: Afternoon in an abandoned room.





	You descended, I amended (And I need it like a hole in the head)

It suddenly occurs to him that they must be related. Tom Riddle jerks in his seat in the Restricted Section and becomes motionless, as he tries to press his mind into its usual cold, detached, analytical patterns. 

She is a parseltongue, he is almost certain, and he has heard of no other bloodlines capable of that magic in the British Isles – it is so inexorably linked to Slytherin and his descendants that as soon as he had demonstrated his ability to a select group of his classmates their small, rigid minds had been changed overnight by the effect of his power. Tom Riddle was no longer a mudblood. It is not impossible, then, that they should be related in some small way – indeed, most descendants of the old wizarding families, among whom he can now number himself, share some amount of blood and ancestry. 

And it is not just that she is a parseltongue, he reflects. He is drawn to her, in a way that he has never been drawn to another person. It is beyond reason or wanting, beyond the desire for dominance or possession. It is an almost unconscious familiarity and a sense of her presence; he always seems to know, in the back of his mind, when she is near. As though there is a faint, fine, invisible thread connecting them, and that he only has to tug a little on it to get some feeling of her proximity. 

He suspects she feels it too. She has been wary of him, he knows, since turning up at their table for the sorting feast, slate-eyed and pale, with large purple shadows making her look almost ill. As much of a shock as her presence had been – transfers at Hogwarts were almost unheard of – she had quickly faded more or less into the background after a week of being eyed by her new housemates, only occasionally demonstrating her magical prowess in the few classes she seemed to take an interest in, such as Defence Against the Dark Arts. 

He has seen her even less as of late in the Common Room, and she was even beginning to skip dinner on a regular basis. Though, he thinks, considering her in his mind’s eye, it wasn’t as though she was in a position to be skipping meals on a regular basis. She is thin in a way that seems painful, with that pinched look that adolescents sometimes get when they have grown too quickly. She rolls up her sleeves and cuffs her shirt frequently, and he thinks that it would be a matter of ease to snap those long, skinny wrists of hers. And then he thinks of her expression, when she had met his gaze across the Common Room, where she was curled up in a plush armchair by one of their windows that opened to the Black Lake, tinged in greenish light. She had looked eerie and fierce, challenging his right to look at her. No – perhaps she wasn’t breakable. 

He checks his watch. It is nearing curfew, but he has his prefect’s rounds tonight, so he supposes he can stay a while longer in the library. On a whim, he casts himself out, his magic, or something of him, searching for her. To his surprise, he realizes that she is relatively nearby. He closes his book, and methodically and swiftly packs his bag. He locks the gate to the Restricted Section behind him, and nods to the librarian on his way out. She is somewhere above him, he thinks, and makes for the nearest stairway, winding his way closer to her. It is an inexact method of finding someone – but he manages it eventually. 

He opens a door to what appears to be an abandoned classroom. Hogwarts is something of a hodgepodge of building, towers and halls added up to it over the centuries, and some of the older parts have been more or less abandoned. Tom has explored nearly all of it in his quest to find the Chamber of Secrets. 

She sits up with fantastic speed as he opens the door and looks mildly alarmed as their eyes meet – she has been lying on an old wooden desk, ornately carved, that rests at what must have been the front of the classroom. Her expression dissolves into something flat, something unhappy but hidden. But she has her wand in hand. 

“Riddle,” she says, “what are you doing here?” 

He merely shrugs, and enters the room, closing the door behind him. He wanders, casually, not directly to her, but over to the other side of the room, where he runs a hand over a bricked up window, dimly lit by the blue flames that she has conjured to light the room. He does not turn his back to her; he does not trust her not to curse him. 

She shifts her position so that she is still sitting on the desk, but her legs now rest over the front of it, knees bent and feet braced against its ornate dusty surface. 

“Surely you could have managed a cleaning charm?” he says, raising an eyebrow and drawing his wand. With a wave, much of the dust vanishes. He makes a face - silent casting is not difficult for him – nothing really is – but spells that he rarely has occasion to use nonetheless tend not to work perfectly on his first try. 

“I’m not really very interested in cleaning,” she says, a private joke lingering somewhere in the corners of her mouth, twisted ever so slightly into something that is not a smile. He shrugs in response, to express his indifference to her opinions on cleaning, and takes a step closer, one hand lingering on the rough stone wall. 

“I found myself thinking, the other day,” he begins, offering her one of his charming smiles that she never seems to appreciate, “about something you’d said about family.” 

Some alarm, some readiness stiffens her spine and narrows her eyes. 

“I don’t have any, anymore,” she says, meeting his eyes directly, without looking away, something that she almost never does. He brushes against the surface of her mind and she seems to flinch momentarily. He catches a glimpse of three people in a mirror, and a child on the other side, filled with a terrible, painful longing before he has to turn his focus back to the girl in front of him. 

“Well, yes,” he says, “I suppose you don’t.” He advances a little further, testing the limits of her ability to tolerate his nearness. He feels excited, powerful, godlike – as though he is on the precipice of something vitally important to him, such as he had felt upon committing his first murder, upon unleashing the basilisk on the unwitting Hogwarts population, upon discovering that _magic_ what the name for what he could do. 

She brings her wand up in response. He continues to smile at her, affable as a shark. 

“Not in the immediate sense, anyway,” he adds, almost offhand. She offers no response. 

“You know, I suppose, that most witches and wizards, excepting the muggleborns of course, or those who are only the first or second generation of new blood, have some degree of relation with each other?” This time he makes it clear that he is waiting for her answer. 

“Yes.” 

“Good,” he says. “Well then, have you supposed that you might have some cousins, however distant, among the students here? Or even the professors – most of them are from old families,” he adds, almost as an afterthought. 

“No, I’m fairly certain I don’t,” she says, as though she is unwilling to consider the possibility. He smiles at her, truly amused now, and covers his mouth with a hand, as if to hide it. 

“ _Really_?” he asks, “ _so_ _sure?_ ” 

“ _Yes_ ,” she replies, and then looks horror-stricken as he tilts his head back and laughs, a wild, mad, full thing. 

“You’re a parseltongue,” he marvels aloud, grinning widely at her. “Did you really think that was something you could hide? From me?” 

She looks panicked and angry and raises her wand again. 

“I don’t know what you’re playing at, Riddle,” she says, low and angry, “but – ”

“Playing at?” he echoes, waving his wand in a circle in the air, adding a ring of bright fire to throw their faces into sharper relief. “ _I’m not playing at anything –_ _who are you, little snakeling, who are you? Only kin of Salazar Slytherin can speak, so that does make us bloodline-sharers, of a sort._

Parseltongue is a strange and inexact language, but he can’t imagine that she will find its images and idioms so hard to parse. 

“I’m nobody,” she says, obviously lying, and denying him the pleasure of hearing parseltongue from the only family member he has definitely located, however distant she may be. He is angry, but he laughs again; her denial is its own kind of amusing, as if a descendent of one of the greatest sorcerers to live could be nobody. 

“You ought to know, as well as I do,” he tells her, “that these things are hereditary. I had wondered, you know, if it was only a trick of the mind,” he confides, seeing her confusion, “your little warning from the furniture. They are old spells,” the ones animating much of Slytherin house, he means, “but all the same they speak to you, even if you don’t reply. But there’s no point in hiding it now – you’ve revealed yourself…” 

She is pale and angry, two spots of colour now visible beneath the flickering ring of yellow light he has added to her blue flames. 

“It’s funny,” he muses, still keeping a close eye on her, in case she tries to curse him, “you probably didn’t know, did you?” He takes her in greedily now, noting their physical similarities. They are not inconsiderable. They share dark hair, of a similar shade, though hers is much wilder and hardly tamed by the braids she favours, and a pale complexion. They have finely boned faces, though her features are more feminine, unsurprisingly. Their eyes are different – hers are a striking green, and almond shaped, and his are dark. She is also tall, he supposes, though he suspects that he will continue growing, as most young men do, and doubts she will, at her age. They even have similar builds, though again, hers is a more feminine, willowy reflection of his own tall frame - over the past year his shoulders have been growing broader and his musculature becoming more defined. 

She looks disturbed, and something unpleasant twists inside of him at her unwillingness to consider it. 

“I don’t see how it can be possible. It must not be,” she says, her eyes far away and horrified, focused on some matter that he is not privy to – yet. 

“Is that so?” he says, taking another small step forward. 

“My family were all killed years ago,” she says, her voice harsh and accusing. Murder is not particularly common in Wizarding Britain, not in recent decades, anyway, but there were poisonings and curses that had wiped out a great number of distinguished lines only centuries past and perhaps she is some last remnant of one – as he is. 

“And mine are dead as well,” he says, impatient, “but Salazar Slytherin was born a thousand years ago, so can you really be so sure that you have no trace of his blood,” 

Her face darkens more, if such a thing is possible, and it occurs to him that the breeze ruffling her hair is no breeze at all, and the static crawling up his skin is no natural phenomenon. He is getting better at tasting the magic on others and so he opens his mouth silently and narrows his eyes, the slight physical mimicry an aid to his concentration rather than serving any more practical purpose. 

And she is powerful – probably almost as powerful as he is. And something dark and oddly familiar twines about her, or runs through her if such a thing is possible. 

“Ianthe,” he mutters, tasting the syllables and noting her flinch – he has never called her by her name before. There is something altogether despairing in her eyes, but some odd thing that looks almost like a kind of hope. A savage kind, that persists in spite of decency. 

“I had almost given up on discovering family,” he whispers, more to himself than to her. She finally meets his gaze and he fancies there is a kind of despairing kinship there. 

“So did I.” 


End file.
